Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler and Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sánchez headed the review, reported in a September 12 Commerce Department news release. China is the United States’ second-largest trading partner, and U.S. goods exports in 2012 were $110.6 billion, up 6.4 percent from the previous year, the release said.
Cutler emphasized that “the JCCT remains an important venue for us to address concrete trade and investment issues, and we look forward to working on these issues with our Chinese counterparts in the weeks and months ahead.”
“While we recognize the significant and complex challenges many American companies face in China, the U.S.-China trade relationship has a strong foundation and will continue to yield substantial dividends for both countries,” Sánchez said. “We continue to look for opportunities such as the JCCT process to resolve key trade and investment barriers in China, to ensure our shared prosperity, and to broaden cooperation on key issues with a view toward making it easier to for U.S. service providers and exporters to do business with China.”
The US officials stressed the importance of fully implementing past JCCT commitments and discussed U.S. priorities for the JCCT process, such as intellectual property rights, pharmaceuticals, government procurement, investment, services, industrial policies, regulatory obstacles and agriculture. The annual high-level meeting of the JCCT will take place later in 2013 in China, co-chaired by the U.S. trade representative and the US secretary of commerce, along with China’s vice premier.
The expanding U.S.-China relationship has also resulted in increased foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States. FDI from China has grown at an annual average rate of 71 percent from 2008 to 2012, making China the fastest-growing source of FDI into the United States. Tens of thousands of jobs are the result of foreign direct investment in the United States.
Cutler and Sanchez also encouraged their Chinese counterparts and Chinese multinational companies to attend the SelectUSA Investment Summit on October 31 and November 1. President Obama is hosting the summit to share why the United States is the premier location for foreign investment and what his administration is doing to encourage investment.
